A friend and former student of mine, a police officer on Long Island, tells me:
"Right now heroin is cheaper then crack and cocaine. So it has become the drug of choice. From Jan 07 to Aug 07 there was 42 heroin overdose just in two precinct in Nassau county."
There are eight precincts in Nassau County and a total population of 1.3 million. Let's assume, because I don't know better, that the 2 precincts represent 1/4 of the population. That's an annual heroin overdose death rate of 22 per 100,000 people, about twice the national average.
If we really cared about saving lives, we could save these lives. But we clearly don't care because we persist in policies that cause deaths. If saving lives were our priority, we could follow the policies of countries with much lower overdose death rates.
First of all, education. We treat all illegal drugs as equally bad. Zero Tolerance. But all drugs aren't equally bad. Heroin is a horrible drug. Maybe the worst. Marijuana isn't really bad at all. Cocaine is somewhere in between. This is important. I would love to give teenagers weed if only they wouldn't try heroin. At least tell them the truth about weed so they'll believe it when you tell them to fear heroin.
Take the Netherlands. Yes, the Netherlands. The country that drug warriors love to laugh at and dismiss because they don't want to fight our war on drugs. In Amsterdam, you can walk into a tax-paying store and legally buy weed, hash, even magic mushrooms. The government gives out heroin to addicts (not most addicts, however). Prohibitionists say that "sends the wrong message."
Here's the message: in the Netherlands, drug usage rates and overdose rates are much lower than in the U.S. (and so is their incarceration rate, while we're at it).
Fewer people take drugs because they don't play the prohibitionist's drug game. Those that do take drugs don't die. The overdose rate in the Netherlands is 0.75 per 100,000.
Get this: in their entire country of over 16 million, there were 122 overdose deaths in a year. That's fewer than Baltimore City alone. Probably fewer than Nassau County, too.
We could save lives--tens of thousands of lives each year--if we really cared about saving lives. But we don't. We see overdoses as unfortunate. Hell, maybe not even that. Overdose deaths "send a good message," I've heard.
The war on drugs isn't about saving lives. It's about maintaining prohibition. Too bad prohibition kills.
2 comments:
Sounds like we agree on the drug war. Honest drug education for all, regulating drugs instead of prohibiting them and medical treatment for those with real addictions are much more effective.
It's time to remove all the politicians that promote prohibition. How many more lives have to be needlessly devastated or lost? Prohibited drugs are way easier for kids to get than regulated drugs! Prohibition never works it just causes crime and violence. The year US alcohol prohibition was repealed violent crime fell by 65 percent.
Guns have absolutely nothing to do with using drugs, they have to do with drug prohibition. Al Capone didn’t kill people because he was drunk, he killed people because they got between him and his illegal drug money. The drug gangsters of today do the same!
Even the World Health Organization has documented the Failure of U.S. Drug Policies, read the article here, join the mailing list, watch the videos:
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The USA spends $69 billion a year on the drug war, builds 900 new prison beds and hires 150 more correction officers every two weeks, arrests someone on a drug charge every 17 seconds, jails more people than any nation and has killed over 100,000 citizens in the drug war.
The right; to freedom of religion, free speech, a free press, to keep and bear arms, to be secure in your person, house, papers and effects against unreasonable search and seizure, to life, liberty and property, to be protected from having your property taken by the government without due process of law and without just compensation, to confront the witnesses against you, to be protected from excessive bail, excessive fines, cruel and unusual punishment, to vote and many others have been denied to millions of Americans in the name of the drug war.
I'm glad to see the truth about drugs getting around.
We preach the truth, but we're usually just preaching to the choir.
Hopefully some mainstream politicians (sorry, Libertarians) will take up the issue.
"Al Capone didn't kill people because he was drunk." That's a great line!
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